REVIEW BY PIP HINMAN

Axis of Deceit
By Andrew Wilkie
Black Inc. Agenda, 2004
200 pages, $29.95 (pb)

Andrew Wilkie rose to global prominence as the only spook working for a “coalition of the willing” government to resign in protest against the pending war in Iraq. His resignation on March 7, 2003, sent the Coalition government into a spin, its “damage control” strategy failing to convince an already skeptical public that the intelligence justified the pending war on Iraq.

Axis of Deceit is Wilkie’s account of how and why he came to make this brave decision. Wilkie served years in the Australian Defence Force, and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel before joining the Office of National Assessments in 1999. The ONA coordinates Australia’s foreign intelligence efforts and from 1999 Wilkie worked in its strategic analysis branch, researching weapons of mass destruction. Contrary to some of the government spin, Wilkie was in a good position to judge how the government was using the intelligence.

Wilkie’s central argument is that PM John Howard’s government, like its “coalition of the willing” partners, exaggerated the threat Iraq posed to the world for political purposes. He says that there is no single report he can point to that indicates this, but argues that the government’s selective use of intelligence and alarmist talk about the build-up and transfer of WMDs allowed it to build a case for war by deceit.

The ONA’s pre-war intelligence concluded that Iraq did have some operational WMD programs, but that it still did not constitute a grave and serious threat to the world. The Howard government’s deceit was that it deliberately skewed the truth by taking the ambiguity out of the issue, he argues.

Wilkie takes us into the little-known world of Australian intelligence, describing in a fair amount of detail how information is collected, analysed and assessed. He makes a case that the ONA’s reports were measured and careful, but concedes that political pressure can and does influence what is delivered (he particularly cites the US intelligence agencies). This pressure, he says, also comes from the joint work that Australian, British and US intelligence agencies now carry out.

According to Wilkie, key intelligence assessment qualifications were frequently dropped and much more definite words were put in their place. “Before we knew it, our political leaders had created a mythical Iraq, one where every factory was up to no good.”

One of the more dramatic examples of this was the discovery of two trailers near Mosul in late April and May 2003. “They were seized upon immediately by US officials and a compliant media as unambiguous proof of Iraqi mischief. They were even given the status of actual weapons by George W. Bush.” This was “deliberate dishonesty”, Wilkie argues, as the experts who had examined the trailers had found no evidence of any banned biological agent.

In light of this, Wilkie criticises the rash of inquiries into the intelligence agencies as misdirected. This focus, he says, should instead be directed to how the government used the intelligence. He points out that some MPs routinely persisted with the deceitful practice of resuscitating rumour and innuendo — including the story that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger, and that Saddam Hussein was linked to al Qaeda — long after they had been found to be false.

Following David Jull’s Seante report that exonerated the Howard government’s use of the intelligence, and the Hutton report in Britain, Wilkie says he has no confidence in the inquiry headed by Phillip Flood, which released its findings on July 23.

Before the committee had even started to take evidence, Jull had told the media he expected his findings to back up the government’s case for war! And a Senate hearing in February this year was told that the ONA had been allowed to vet the report before its release. “Well, what an interesting way to run a country — agencies being investigated for malpractice are empowered to review the findings against them as long as it suits the government’s political aims”, comments Wilkie.

Wilkie’s insider account of the government’s manipulation of intelligence material and his admission that intelligence agencies are not immune from politicisation wouldn’t come as a surprise to many. A dramatic example of this was the shift in the ONA’s reporting in September 2002.

At the request of the foreign affairs department, the ONA put together an unclassified report on September 13, 2002, which said that Iraq “is highly likely to have chemical and biological weapons”. It also stated, “There is no reason to believe that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his ambition to acquire nuclear weapons”. Yet the previous day, the ONA had reported that there was “no firm evidence of new CBW [chemical, biological weapon] production”. And beforehand, it had also reported that evidence of Saddam’s nuclear capability was “patchy and inconclusive”.

What had changed? Wilkie argues that the ONA’s sudden shift had everything to do with the government’s mid-September request for an unclassified report for use in the preparation of speeches for the PM and the foreign minister to beef up the case for war. While, he says, ONA is not a policy organisation and doesn’t normally prepare unclassified information for anyone’s speeches, the government’s request was a blatant political exercise and the ONA responded with a “blatantly political briefing note”.

Wilkie readily admits that he’s been on a “steep learning curve” ever since he left the ONA. “Once I thought that anti-war activists were misguided ... but I now think that almost all those who opposed — and still oppose — the Iraq war were just ordinary people with a strong sense of right and wrong.”

This stands in stark contrast to the high level of disillusion in what passes as the rule of law and democracy in society today. “In the end it was left to ordinary people to try to call their governments to account”, Wilkie says, obviously influenced strongly by the groundswell of opposition to the war that culminated in the global mass protests of February 2003.

Wilkie’s story is pretty unique — but his political shift epitomises what happened to so many people over the Iraq war debacle. Now, Wilkie has joined the Greens and is running against Howard in Bennelong in Sydney. He’s unlikely to win the seat, but he’s won the support of many for his decision to stand up for a principle. Axis of Deceit records an important chapter in the history of the illegal war on Iraq, and makes the case for putting conscience ahead of pragmatism.

From Green Left Weekly, July 28, 2004.
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